I don’t think any association committed to solving homelessness ever gets to a point where they go “hmm, yes, we could take some action that solves homelessness for good but that would leave us all unemployed, therefore we shan’t do that”. I get your point but I just don’t believe any such organization operates even close to a level of effectiveness where that sort of thing would be even an option, and thus, the perverse incentives would begin mattering. I’m not sure what “solving homelessness” even looks like (even assuming you give houses to every homeless person now, how do you guarantee things stay that way?), but whatever it is, it’s probably some massive country-wide operation that no single small time charity could ever hope to organize. So basically, for most of these problems, I don’t think the issue arises. If it did, I don’t think the people involved would have such a hard time pivoting to different causes; in most cases there is very little going on that makes them specialized in solving THAT problem rather than having general organizational skills that can easily be applied to a different one. So honestly this feels like a theoretical worry that isn’t a real problem in practice.
While I haven’t looked at the data lately, there are a lot of institutions in the US, as I use the term. Surely of the many social ills they address there are some that solvable/solved?
While I used ending homelessness as an example, the salience of an issue matters too. Climate change organizations receive lots of funding because their cause is seen as an important priority. If that changes, their funding dries up. So they have an incentive on the margin to overemphasize the importance of their associated problem—they benefit from the problem, while generally not solving it. Hence, commensalism.
There being a lot means resources are split and coordination may be harder, it doesn’t make this easier. “Solving climate change” for example is nothing short of a monumental task that requires a complete overhaul of our current industrial system. No tiny group of activists will have the power to do that, they don’t need to keep the problem around to stay relevant. And again, I think this widely misreads the people part of these things: these are people who mostly do want to solve the problems. They may not be optimal at it for various reasons and I get how incentives can create pressures that feed this sort of commensalism even without it being an intentional strategy, but it’s absolutely not obvious to me how the process of “could solve the problem but doesn’t” would manifest here. Perhaps you could argue it for some causes like e.g. animal rescues: lots of people have refuges for stray cats/dogs but their general motivation is probably just that they enjoy having the little fuzzballs around and helping them, so they’re not really tackling the problem of stray animals head on with systematic spaying and neutering etc (though that is absolutely also a thing that they do). Also, I’d make a distinction between straight up commensalism and simple “are not cold utilitarian minimizers of suffering”, because lots of people aren’t the latter because they have other values they think are too important to trade off, so they don’t just go at the problem as hard as they could, but that’s not the same as keeping the problem intentionally around to justify their own work.
I don’t see this as a conscious choice people make to not solve the problems the institution they’re a part of is supposed to address. I agree that many of the individuals within the institution are working in good faith and genuinely care.
The issue is that the incentives of the people are not the same as the incentives of the institution itself, which are to grow and attract more status and money, which happens when the problem is seen as harder and more important.
Yes, Climate Change is obviously not solvable by a few activists, but there’s a finite amount of time/energy/money in the world, and it’s not clear to me at all that it’s optimally distributed between cause areas. More time/energy/money going into solving climate change means less going elsewhere.
I don’t think any association committed to solving homelessness ever gets to a point where they go “hmm, yes, we could take some action that solves homelessness for good but that would leave us all unemployed, therefore we shan’t do that”. I get your point but I just don’t believe any such organization operates even close to a level of effectiveness where that sort of thing would be even an option, and thus, the perverse incentives would begin mattering. I’m not sure what “solving homelessness” even looks like (even assuming you give houses to every homeless person now, how do you guarantee things stay that way?), but whatever it is, it’s probably some massive country-wide operation that no single small time charity could ever hope to organize. So basically, for most of these problems, I don’t think the issue arises. If it did, I don’t think the people involved would have such a hard time pivoting to different causes; in most cases there is very little going on that makes them specialized in solving THAT problem rather than having general organizational skills that can easily be applied to a different one. So honestly this feels like a theoretical worry that isn’t a real problem in practice.
While I haven’t looked at the data lately, there are a lot of institutions in the US, as I use the term. Surely of the many social ills they address there are some that solvable/solved?
While I used ending homelessness as an example, the salience of an issue matters too. Climate change organizations receive lots of funding because their cause is seen as an important priority. If that changes, their funding dries up. So they have an incentive on the margin to overemphasize the importance of their associated problem—they benefit from the problem, while generally not solving it. Hence, commensalism.
There being a lot means resources are split and coordination may be harder, it doesn’t make this easier. “Solving climate change” for example is nothing short of a monumental task that requires a complete overhaul of our current industrial system. No tiny group of activists will have the power to do that, they don’t need to keep the problem around to stay relevant. And again, I think this widely misreads the people part of these things: these are people who mostly do want to solve the problems. They may not be optimal at it for various reasons and I get how incentives can create pressures that feed this sort of commensalism even without it being an intentional strategy, but it’s absolutely not obvious to me how the process of “could solve the problem but doesn’t” would manifest here. Perhaps you could argue it for some causes like e.g. animal rescues: lots of people have refuges for stray cats/dogs but their general motivation is probably just that they enjoy having the little fuzzballs around and helping them, so they’re not really tackling the problem of stray animals head on with systematic spaying and neutering etc (though that is absolutely also a thing that they do). Also, I’d make a distinction between straight up commensalism and simple “are not cold utilitarian minimizers of suffering”, because lots of people aren’t the latter because they have other values they think are too important to trade off, so they don’t just go at the problem as hard as they could, but that’s not the same as keeping the problem intentionally around to justify their own work.
I don’t see this as a conscious choice people make to not solve the problems the institution they’re a part of is supposed to address. I agree that many of the individuals within the institution are working in good faith and genuinely care.
The issue is that the incentives of the people are not the same as the incentives of the institution itself, which are to grow and attract more status and money, which happens when the problem is seen as harder and more important.
Yes, Climate Change is obviously not solvable by a few activists, but there’s a finite amount of time/energy/money in the world, and it’s not clear to me at all that it’s optimally distributed between cause areas. More time/energy/money going into solving climate change means less going elsewhere.